


tilting at windmills

by tenderjock



Series: how long have you been - this [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - andy gets thrown into the ocean instead of quynh, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, mentions of food & starvation & also alcohol (because this is booker we're talking about)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:13:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27162997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenderjock/pseuds/tenderjock
Summary: Andromache starves him.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Old Guard - team
Series: how long have you been - this [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1982701
Comments: 12
Kudos: 88





	tilting at windmills

**Author's Note:**

> huge thank you to @hauntedjaeger (saellys) / @hauntedfalcon on tumblr for betaing and just generally letting me yell at her about this fic. title is a don quixote reference. this fic takes place in an au where andy was thrown into the ocean instead of quynh, and immediately follows pretend there is no kryptonite, so check that fic out!

Andromache starves him.

Anything else he could handle, he thinks. Booker’s been shot, and stabbed, and electrocuted, and set fire to, some of it fairly recently. But starvation pings something desperate and primal in the back of his brain, the memories of smoking fields and the way the temperature would drop in the night.

The oddest part is that Andromache doesn’t seem to realize she’s starving him. She paces like a caged tiger, one end of the room to the other. She sleeps, sometimes, but not for long enough. Booker tries to sneak out of the little abandoned apartment she has them holed up in while she’s asleep, and wakes thirty seconds later to a bloodstain pattern that indicates his throat has been cut. He never even saw her move.

It’s not until his second attempt to escape that he notices that which should have been obvious from the start. Andromache catches him by the back of his dirty shirt, knees him in the kidney and snaps his neck with her bare hands. Before he’s killed, Booker manages to crash an elbow into her face. He loses the plot for a minute or two after that, but when he’s back, he rolls over onto his back to look at her. She’s got a hand to her mouth, which is still bleeding.

“Fuck,” Booker breathes, in French. He’s found that Andromache can understand any language he speaks in, so he figures he might as well speak French. It’s a better language, as languages go. “You’re not healing. Why aren’t you healing?”

Andromache doesn’t say anything, but now that he’s looking for it, Booker sees the dark shadows under her eyes, the pall cast to her skin, the way she trembles just the slightest bit. He stares at her, this woman feared and whispered about for millennia, and bites back a sigh.

“C’mon,” he says, and gathers up his coat, which has been lying on the dusty floor for the past three days. Shaking it out does nothing whatsoever to help the wrinkles or the dirt. Whatever. Maybe the store clerk will just assume they’re a couple of homeless people. He’s had worse assumptions made about him.

Booker takes his eyes off Andromache for – not even a second; a fraction of a second. In that fraction of a second, she has him backed up against the wall, his own pistol to his temple. He stays very, very still.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Andromache grits out.

Booker should probably think carefully about his next words. But he doesn’t. “We need food. _You_ need food, and a shower, and probably some medical care.” He presses his hand gently against the damp patch he had noticed on her abdomen. His hand comes away bloody. Andromache exhales through her nose, sharp, like he’s got a blow in that she didn’t see coming.

After a moment, she steps away from him. Booker doesn’t move, though. The look in her eyes is still wild, ready to break at a moment’s notice. He raises his hands, slowly. The blood on his right palm is sticky and starting to flake off as it dries.

“I just want to go to the store,” he says. “Get a meal and some gauze.” He’s pretty sure gauze is still used to pad injuries. He’s not entirely caught up on the marvels of modern medicine, except for the type of medicine that involves strapping someone to a medical table and –

Booker blinks, and brings himself back to the present. Andromache has lowered the gun, but she’s still wound with tension.

“I’m coming with you,” she says, and slides the gun in the waistband of her pants, hidden under the back of her shirt. Now that he’s paying attention, he realizes she’s a little unsteady on her feet. It seems like maybe a safety concern to unleash an injured and slightly unhinged Andromache onto the Super U, but he doesn’t see that he has much choice in the matter.

They make it to the store on foot, with no more incidents. Andromache starts every time a car speeds by, but he thinks that’s just warranted jumpiness. Booker browses the shelves while Andromache follows, exactly six feet behind him. He grabs a sandwich from a deli display, unwraps it and starts eating while he shops.

Wiping some mustard off his chin with his shirt sleeve, Booker dumps several packages of gauze, some wound disinfectant, and a bottle of aspirin into the basket dangling from his elbow. Andromache sneaks up in the corner of his vision and puts a bag of cookies in the basket. When he turns to look at her, she ghosts a couple of steps backward and narrows her eyes.

Booker finds himself smiling, just a little bit. Taking another bite of the sandwich, he hooks a couple of one-liter bottles of water off the shelf. She should probably be better hydrated, he thinks, and tries to remember if the apartment they had spent the last three days in had running water. To be on the safe side, he grabs a third bottle of water, and a bottle of orange juice, too.

His flask is still full, in the pocket of his dirty coat, mostly due to the fact that he hasn’t taken so much as a sip from it in days. One less thing to buy, he supposes.

They do get something of a side-eye from the clerk, but they don’t do anything when it becomes clear that Booker has the cash to pay for everything, including the sandwich that he is in the process of eating. As they exit the store, Andromache slips a hand into the bag and pulls out the cookies.

Andromache somehow manages to still be terrifying, even while eating chocolate-covered Madeleines. When Booker hesitates outside of the store, wondering if he could make a break for it while they were in public, she glowers at him, cheeks puffed out with buttery goodness. He makes the informed decision to go back to the apartment without fuss. Booker gets the feeling that Andromache would not hesitate to shoot him in the back in the middle of a busy Parisian street.

They get back to the apartment without Andromache shooting anyone, including Booker. Thank God for small blessings, he thinks, then snorts at the notion that God had anything to do with any of this.

He’s pretty sure that Andromache’s just squatting in this old building. It might be slated for demolition, now that he considers the construction site outside. Great. Maybe they’ll wake up to find the whole building in ruins around them, and they’ll be crushed to death and he can finally get some goddamned rest.

Instead, he turns on the water of the filthy kitchen sink. It sputters and runs rusty for a couple of minutes, but it runs. He had also bought a roll of paper towels, with the vague notion that if he ran out of gauze and tape, he could just wad her wound with them. Andromache has taken the gun out. It dangles from her left hand, and trembles.

Booker works faster. He dampens a paper towel and holds it out to Andromache.

“Here,” he says. She just stares at him. He grabs her hand – not the gun-wielding one – and folds it around the paper towel. She jumps at the contact, and then slowly sinks to her knees.

“I feel,” she says, and swallows hard enough that Booker can see her throat move. She doesn’t finish the sentence. Booker kneels next to her.

“Here,” he says again, and draws her tank top carefully over her head. Underneath, she’s got an equally dirty sports bra and sluggishly bleeding hole in her gut.

Booker whistles. “How’d you manage this?” he asks, and dabs at the bloody wound with the paper towel. Andromache lets out something that could be groan of pain or an exasperated sigh, or maybe both.

“Trying to get your address,” she says. “I tracked you down to this pilot named Andrei.”

His head comes up at that. “You didn’t kill Andrei, did you?” he asks, horrified.

Andromache laughs a little, a short huff of breath. “No,” she says. “But one of his friends stabbed me. _Fuck_ .” That last bit was probably directed at the way Booker had started to wipe blood off of her stomach. He was trying to be as gentle as he could, but he honestly didn’t know what he was doing.

Together, they managed to rub antibiotics into the stab wound and plug up the bleeding with a truly staggering amount of gauze and tape. Booker makes Andromache eat another cookie, and also to take some painkillers with the water he had bought. He’s pretty sure that for a massive hole in the stomach, a person was supposed to take more heavy-duty pain medication than the ones he bought at the store, but he was working with what he had.

Andromache changes, moving slowly. She’s got a pair of jeans and a couple of T-shirts in a little duffle bag that she’s tucked away in the corner of the bedroom. Booker fishes his flask out of his pocket, drains it in three long gulps, and squeezes his eyes shut. He needs to think.

Something hits him in the chest. He opens his eyes, blinking at Andromache. She’s thrown a T-shirt at him. It’s clean, and maybe big enough to fit him.

The roll of paper towels hits him in the head while he’s still contemplating the shirt. When he looks at Andromache, she shrugs with the shoulder on her non-injured side.

“You’ve got blood on your shirt,” she says.

“I wonder why,” Booker shoots back. Andromache’s mouth twitches up, and then back down. Booker changes. The shirt is a little tight in the chest, but it’s clean, which is good enough for him right now.

Andromache settles down in a corner of the room, sits cross-legged and closes her eyes. When he shifts, her eyes snap open. No chance of escape there, then.

Booker lies down on the floor to think. He was sort of in a clusterfuck. If he knew how to contact the others, he probably – well. He probably wouldn’t contact them, if he’s being honest with himself. He still had over four hundred and ninety-nine years left of his sentence. But there would be the _option_ of contacting them. Booker likes to have options.

Sometime after sunset, Andromache dozes off. Booker closes his eyes, but he doesn’t go to sleep. He needs to think. He needs to think of something, right now, a way to get out of this.

Despite the gnawing hunger and the general discomfort, and despite his resolve to figure out a plan of action, Booker drifts off, cheek pressed to the dirty floor.

: :

Nile wakes with a gasp. It’s becoming a common enough occurrence, lately, which would concern her if she had the energy to be concerned with all of the weird shit that’s been going down in her life recently.

She’s had to compartmentalize. It’s probably not healthy, but “not healthy” is sort of the baseline for these people she’s fallen in with. For – for Booker, too.

They don’t talk about Booker. It’s been six months, give or take a couple of weeks, she doesn’t know. (That’s a lie. It’s been twenty-five weeks and two days. Nile has been stuck in an uncomfortable rut, counting up and down the days of Booker’s five-hundred-year sentence. She’s not sure why; she barely knew the guy, but the weight of that punishment reverberated inside of her. She feels guilty. She hopes that fades with time.)

But Nile has an excuse to think about Booker, this time. Her dream wasn’t about Andromache, lost to the waves. Instead, it was Booker’s face, the scruff of a beard and a dripping stain of what looked like blood or ink on his shirtfront. She remembers seeing his hands, flexing compulsively, a strip of masking tape dangling from one finger.

She didn’t know what that was about. There was no reason for her to dream of him, after all, unless this was just the latest manifestation of her guilt. Nile’s already met him, so she shouldn’t be dreaming about him, right? It would be just her luck to be stuck with dreams of Booker for the next four hundred ninety-nine and a half years.

Nile thinks about it for a second. His eyes in the dream were intent, not sad. His mouth curled into a humorless grin, like when he told them that _misery loves company_ .

Damn. Booker’s the poster child for misery loving company.

She yawns, and decides to drop it. If the dreams continue, she might bring them up with Quynh – or, no, with Nicky. Quynh still seems a little aloof to Nile, like a shining bronze icon. She’s not sure why she gets that impression of Quynh; the woman’s been nothing but kind to her. But there’s something in the way she holds herself, something vast and untouchable.

Nile shakes herself, full-body, like a dog, in the hopes that it drives thoughts of the dream away, and goes to breakfast.

: :

Andy is sleeping.

Halfway through taping the gauze to her stomach – and he had to do it twice, because the first time the blood made the tape too slick to stick onto her skin – Booker decides to call her Andy. Andromache was a mouthful. He hasn’t told Andy, yet, about her new nickname. Instead, he gives her more water and the second half of the sandwich he got at the store. Her breath is coming in short gasps, which was rather concerning, but she had unequivocally refused to go to a hospital when he suggested it.

Now she is sleeping, lightly, twitching back to consciousness every time he moves. Booker gives up on the idea, half-formed, of sneaking out while she is asleep. He counts up to ten and back down to one on his fingers, wishing he had his crochet work, or at least a book.

At about one hour after sunset, Andy sits up. A hand goes to her stomach; she hasn’t bled through the mess of gauze and masking tape yet, which is a good sign, but the painkillers have probably worn off. Booker, who has been amusing himself by reciting Siken in his head, sits up, too.

“Get up,” she says, rather unnecessarily, as Booker is already scrambling to his feet. Andy draws his pistol from the waistband of her jeans. “We’re leaving.”

“Where,” Booker starts. The sentence he wanted to say was _where are we going_ , but Andy leaves the room before he can get that far. He exhales through his nose, and follows her.

She doesn’t look so hot. Andy is shaking, subtly. Her skin is more gray than white, now. She’s still holding the pistol in one trembling hand. The other hand is pressed against the bandaged wound in her stomach. She gestures with the gun for Booker to go first. He hesitates. She cocks the gun and points it at his dick. Booker winces, and goes first down the stairs.

They pile into a tiny car that is parked downstairs, on the other side of the construction site. Booker wonders, a little hysterically, how Andy learned how to drive. She’s still got the gun trained on his dick, which seems kind of unsafe given that he’s the one driving.

She leans back in the passenger seat. Booker starts the car and turns off the parking brake. Andy’s breath is coming faster. He glances in the rearview mirror. There are a couple of parked cars, but no one is on the little side street they’re parked on. _No one to hear me scream_ , he thinks, and bites back a wildly inappropriate smile.

“Where to, boss?” he asks. It slips out. He regrets it the moment he says it.

“Just drive where I tell you to,” Andy says. The hand on the gun tenses, and Booker drives.

: :

Nile is taking a nap at three in the afternoon Tokyo time because she is utterly, impossibly jetlagged. The others seem to be used to it, so she doesn’t bother complaining. Joe says that she’ll adjust; she’s not entirely sure that she _wants_ to, though. So. It’s the middle of the day and Nile is curled up in a pile of bedding on a couch in an old office building. Quynh had some sort of deal with the building’s owner, so they could stay there even when there were actual people working.

It was kind of uncomfortable, sleeping in one room while random people worked in the next room over. The lights buzzed. The corner of the couch dug into her shoulder blade. Nicky and Quynh were cleaning their weapons at the short little table on the floor. Joe was sitting next to the couch, sketching.

Despite it all, Nile falls into, if not sleep, then at least a tired stupor. Her eyes drift shut. Her breathing settles.

There: a blood-streaked hand gripping a steering wheel. Booker’s terse look. Andromache’s white-knuckled hand, gripping a pistol, the other hand going to the wet patch on her stomach. A hazy view of a winding Parisian suburb. Nile shoots upright, gasping.

Nicky and Quynh snap to attention. Joe reaches out, catches Nile by the shoulder and the waist before she falls off the couch. Nile bends over, still gulping air down, hand pressed against the dream echo of a wound. She blinks several times in succession.

“Andromache,” Nile says, looking up at Quynh. The other woman’s face is tight with – something.

“Andromache,” Nile says again. “She got out.”

: :

Booker pulls into a driveway in the suburbs. It belongs to a large house with boarded up windows and peeling paint. The garden is beyond overgrown. It looks like it’s probably haunted. Booker turns the car off and considers the state of his life.

He can’t consider it for long. Andy nudges his shoulder with the butt of the pistol, and he gets out. She follows him with the gun and her sharp eyes. At her wordless gesture, Booker enters the house.

The front door isn’t locked. When he pries the rusty hinges open, he can hear rats rustling in the walls. He bites back a sigh. What he wouldn’t give to be literally anywhere else right now. He could be in the Caribbean, on a nice yacht, flirting with pretty girls.

He snorts, quietly. Dream on, le Livre.

Andy is behind him, out of his line of sight. They go through the sitting room, up a flight of stairs and to what must be the master bedroom. The pistol just barely brushes the back of his head. Booker considers his chances of disarming Andy without getting a bullet to the brain.

“There’s a new one,” Andy says, voice rough. “I saw her.”

“Yes,” Booker says. He curls a hand into a fist. “Her name is Nile. She appeared about six months ago.”

Andy makes a small, hurt noise, and Booker can hear her foot drag. He spins, going for a simultaneous leg sweep and rabbit punch. The sweep makes contact; the punch does not. Andy stumbles, drops to a knee, grabs his arm, and throws him over her shoulder, before raising the gun and squeezing the trigger.

Booker is out for a minute or two. He comes back to life with the start, eyes snapping open. His neck and the front of his new shirt is splattered with blood and brains. Ugh.

More distressing is the appearance of the straitjacket. He considers his bound arms for a moment, then looks up at Andy. He’s lying on the dusty floor of the bedroom’s walk-in closet. There’s a body-shaped track in the dust of the room where she must have dragged him. She’s backlit by the weak morning sun in the doorway.

“What’s your plan, boss?” he asks, not judgmental, just genuinely curious. She swallows, throat bobbing up and down with the motion. Her breath is coming in frantic gasps. She doesn’t answer.

Andy closes the closet door, leaving him lying on the floor. Booker hears her lock the door, too. He rolls over onto his back and closes his eyes, and waits for something to happen.

: :

As soon as the words leave her lips, the entire team bursts into a flurry of activity. Joe goes back to his sketchbook, as Quynh and Nicky tag-team Nile to draw out information from her.

_Were there any distinguishing landmarks?_ A church, she thinks. A big, old building with a steeple. A statue – Saint Sebastian, maybe. 

_Was the sun up yet?_ Yes, it looked like mid-morning. 

_What about the car?_ A Fiat. Manual. Kind of banged up on the inside, with a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror.

“She has short hair,” Nile says. “Like a pixie cut. She was with Booker – she had a gun on him, and he was driving. The music from the radio was French.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath and looks around at the three of them.

Joe is frowning, pencil flying as he frantically draws. Nicky is attempting to turn on the very nice laptop that Copley gave them before they left England. He’s peering at the locked screen like an old man.

Quynh is looking directly at Nile. Nile meets her eyes and then immediately has to look away. There’s something raw and desperate in Quynh’s gaze, an ache that can’t be healed in the course of one dream or one conversation. She looks wild, and hopeful, and Nile isn’t sure which one is worse.

“She’s back,” Quynh says, soft. Joe looks up from his sketchbook.

“We’ll find her, boss,” he says. He tears the page out and hands it to Nile. There, just like she described, is the church and Booker covered in blood and dust and Andromache’s drawn face. Nile touches the sketch with just the pads of her fingers, and offers it to Quynh.

Quynh doesn’t take it. Instead, she picks up the labrys off the table where it had been lying with the rest of their weapons. She swings in a slow figure-eight, then slides it into the sheath on her back.

“Let’s go bring her home,” Quynh says.

: :

It’s dark. It’s been dark for a while. Booker’s been lying there, listening to the rats scurrying around and the old house groan and creak around him, and thinking. He keeps spiraling in the same circle of thoughts, and the upshot of it is that he’s stuck there until Andy decides to move him.

Both of his hands are asleep, and one of his feet. He stomps his foot against the ground, then wriggles until he’s on his left side. He frowns at the wall; he can’t see anything, but he knows that the wall is about three feet from his face in that direction.

He’s hungry again and wishing that he had hung onto the last half of that sandwich. Christ, but he has not been having a good day. A good week. Or a good year, to be entirely honest.

Suddenly: footsteps in the next room over. Booker goes still, head cocked to try to hear better. Voices, loud and angry. More footsteps, silence, and then a gunshot.

Booker contemplates his situation. He sits up, carefully so as not to fall over without his arms free. His left hand has passed the tingling stage of being asleep and is the territory of total numbness. He could probably scream, but since he has no idea who the newcomer is, that might not be a good idea.

The door to the closet creaks as someone tries to open it. “It’s locked,” he says, then clears his throat. Whoever is on the other side of the door takes a couple of steps. Then, without warning, the door splinters open against a solid kick.

Booker has to close his eyes against the blazing mid-afternoon light that pours in. After a moment, he squints up at –

“Nile,” he says. He blinks, but she’s still there, dukes up and eyebrows raised.

“Booker,” she says. Then: “What the _fuck_ is going on.”

It wasn’t a question, really, but Booker answers it anyway. “Andy,” he says. “She’s not healing, she needs to go to the hospital –” He stops, tugging absentmindedly at his restraints.

“Andy?” Nile asks. She goes over to him and kneels to help him out of the straitjacket. He gets one arm free and shakes it out. It goes from numb to painful pinpricks to being alright again in the span of about forty seconds. They manage to get the other arm free and he stands up. Nile is still kneeling with the straitjacket in her hands.

“She did this to you?” she asks. Nile reaches out and brushes his chest with just the tips of her fingers. There’s blood on his shirt; he’s not entirely sure when that happened. The last few days are blurring together, lack of sleep and lack of food doing a number on his head. “Andromache, I mean. Andy?”

“Yes,” Booker says. He offers her a hand to get up, which she ignores.

She frowns at him instead. “She did this to you,” she says again. “Fuck. And you still want her to go to the hospital.”

Booker inhales in, exhales out. Here’s the thing: he’s been there. As the new kid, it was hard to understand the others’ devotion to each other. The family aspect of it all. The way they would die for each other, the way they _had_ died for each other. The reason his betrayal warranted him five hundred lonely years.

“She’s one of us,” Booker says. He doesn’t quite have the guts to look Nile in the eyes as he says it.

“Alright,” Nile says. “Whatever.” She balls up the jacket, then tosses it in the far corner of the room.

Booker swipes half-heartedly at his face with the hem of his t-shirt. It probably just smears the dirt and blood around further, but he feels better for having tried. He follows Nile out of the master bedroom and down the stairs to what could generously be called a living room.

Andy is sitting on an overstuffed armchair. She looks tired, and is visibly shaking. Nicky has the back of one hand pressed to her forehead, like that will do anything to help. He probably saw it in a movie.

“She needs to go to the hospital,” Booker says. All of the others look up at him.

“No hospital,” Andy grinds out. It looks like she had bled through her bandage, too.

“Definitely a hospital,” Nile says. “You’re in shock. And bleeding.”

“I feel fine,” Andy lies, like a liar. Booker glances at Nile. She’s got her _these fucking people again_ face on. He doesn’t blame her. He makes another attempt to rub the dirt off of his face.

“Whose car are we taking?” Joe asks. He places a careful hand on Andy’s shoulder. She goes tense, all over, like a nervous horse. Then, after a moment, she melts into the touch.

“Both cars,” Quynh says. “Nile and I are driving. Joe, Che, you’re with me. Booker –”

Everyone looks at Booker. He resists the urge to shift uncomfortably.

“Booker can go with Nile and Nicky,” Quynh says after a long pause. Her direct gaze pins him in place as surely as a knife through the back of the hand. He nods, but she’s already looked away.

Andy has her eyes closed. Quynh reaches out, touches her shoulder. Andy looks up, and there’s anger in her face, and pain, and sorrow. She doesn’t pull away from the touch. Booker has no idea how much of that is weariness and how much of it is love.

Booker looks at Joe. He’s got one eyebrow raised, and he’s watching Andy and Quynh. Then, like he felt Booker’s gaze, Joe turns to look at him.

The last time Joe looked at him, it was on the bank of the Thames, and his eyes had been full of equal parts anger and sorrow. Now, he looks at Booker and he looks – he looks –

Grateful, maybe. Glad, with a touch of good humor. Joe is looking at Booker like he’s _family_ again, and for all that Booker hates the solitude, he can barely stand that expression on Joe’s face right now.

Quynh tucks herself under Andy’s arm; Nicky takes the other side, and between the two of them they manage to half-walk, half-carry Andy to the car. Booker, Joe, and Nile follow.

It’s not until he’s crammed in the back of Andy’s little Fiat, knees bent up to his chin, that Booker loses it. He doesn’t know when he starts crying, just that Nicky wordlessly passes him a tissue. Nile meets his eyes in the mirror and smiles, warm and gentle.

Booker swallows hard, and closes his eyes against the hope ballooning in his chest.

They drive on, turning down the narrow road behind Quynh’s car, and he knows that there’s Andy to deal with and hospitals to go to and explanations to be had, but right now –

Right now, Booker is with his family again, and he can’t help but be happy, for the first time in a very long time.

**Author's Note:**

> big thanks once again to @hauntedjaeger!! i'm tenderjock on tumblr if you want to chat :)


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